Episode One: A Horrible Presence

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR

My name is Charlie Moss and I’ve been a freelance journalist and writer for more than 10 years. I’ve written for publications like The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Vice, and The Bitter Southerner. I also used to work for an online camping magazine called The Dyrt. It was there, in 2018, where I wrote about a haunted campground just outside of Staunton, Virginia. The more I dug into the story, the more I realized this wasn’t just some simple Halloween ghost tale. It was something much more profound than I ever imagined. And I’ve spent the last two years finding out as much as I can about it. About What Happened at Braley Pond.
This is episode one - A Horrible Presence

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
When I was younger, I hated anything having to do with ghosts. I couldn’t watch horror movies because they scared the shit out of me. On the occasion I did see one, I would spend the next week paralyzed with fear if I thought too much about it, especially at night. I was one of the rare people who thought the movie The Sixth Sense was horrifying. I saw it in the theater and couldn’t watch it for years after.
But after attending my father’s funeral at age 22, that all changed. A couple of days after the service, I woke up from a dream in the middle of the night, screaming, my entire body drenched with sweat. In this dream, I was standing by myself staring into blackness when someone tapped my shoulder from behind. I turned around to see my dead father, looking exactly the same as he did in his casket, He didn’t say a word. He just stared at me with this expressionless face. And that’s when I woke up.
The whole thing felt so real. I can still feel his finger on the tip of my shoulder as he tapped it and the way he looked in front of me, thin, pale, ghostly. When I woke up, I was convinced it was real. I still question if it was.



CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
More than 20 years later, that event changed me. My fear of ghosts has turned into a fascination. Do ghosts really exist? If so, what determines who sees one and who doesn’t?
That fascination led me to discover a place called Braley Pond.



CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
Braley Pond is a 4-and-a-half acre recreational area located in the George Washington and Jefferson National Forest — just 3o minutes west of Staunton, Virginia. It was constructed by the United States Forest Service in 1965, and is a popular place to camp, fish, bike, and hike for locals and visitors alike.
Despite its popularity during the day, Braley Pond has become infamous for what happens there at night. Google “Braley Pond hauntings,” and you’ll find links to numerous paranormal sites recounting ghostly experiences that have occurred there for years.
There is, as some folks have told me, a good reason for that.
The rumor of a reported suicide in 2004 at Braley Pond has made the rounds locally and online, though it’s never been confirmed. A cyclist was killed under mysterious circumstances during the Shenandoah 100 race in 2015, his body found at Braley Pond. And an experienced hiker named Robert Fitzgerald has been missing in the area since 2012. Though there were no Civil War battles within the city of Staunton itself, the battles of Waynesboro, Piedmont, Cross Keys, and others were fought in the area, with much blood spilled, adding another layer of creepiness to Braley Pond.
These events, and rumors of others like them, have fueled stories of strange things happening at Braley Pond. People have reported hearing ghostly children laughing at night, seeing mysterious figures hovering above the pond water, and feeling a terrible, unexplainable presence there.

MARK HOLLAND
Of course, I'm sure you've seen the reports of supposedly hearing the sounds of kids screaming, you know, and again, reported, I haven't seen it documented not substantiated, but reported, you know, from hikers, um, bikers, people camping out and things like that.

MARK HOLLAND
Multiple suicides. But I couldn't find anything to concern that no documentation of it, probably one of those rumor things, you know,

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
That’s Mark Holland, a paranormal investigator based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I call home. He’s the one who first told me about Braley Pond. When I started looking online for any possible hauntings at Braley Pond, that’s when I discovered Black Raven Paranormal Society, run by Marty Seibel. On its website, it lists two investigations that took place in late 2006 and early 2008. Although no paranormal activity was found during those two visits, it did mention a murder that took place there in 2003.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
Originally called the Shenandoah Valley Paranormal Society, Black Raven is a Staunton-based paranormal investigation group known around the region for its investigations into the things that go bump in the night as well as its downtown ghost tours.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
When he was younger, Marty and his friends would go out to Braley Pond at night to hang out and party. He’d always heard about strange things happening at Braley Pond but never experienced them for himself.

MARTY SEIBEL
I know, um, through my younger years, back in my twenties and thirties, that was a popular place. We would go out there and party. So we'd walk around the big pond out there. Bailey's pawn.

MARTY SEIBEL
you know, we were fortunate. We would go out there. I remember it was one of the reasons why we get out there because there would never be anybody out there. So when we got there late at night, you know, there wouldn't be anybody out there, nobody. But the Rangers or anything would ride through. Um, so we would go out there and hang out. It just had a for and creepy feel. And, you know, when you're out and about like that, and, you know, you're wanting to stop and party, it was the perfect place.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
It wasn’t until he heard about a 2003 gang-affiliated murder that took place there that Marty decided to take his team to investigate.

MARTY SEIBEL
Well, additionally, I'd heard about it in the newspaper, And, you know, I thought, gee, well, you know, if that's what you were going to commit a murder and dumped somebody, that would be almost the perfect place. when we did put our, initially our paranormal team together, it was only like four of us. So we did actually go out there and do a minor investigation, just basically testing out some of the equipment. That was before I had met Shea.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
During my initial research, one of the stories that was circulating online detailed one of Marty’s team members getting mysteriously attacked there by some sort of ghostly entity, and her alleged suicide shortly after. That’s why I reached out to Marty. The stories I had read online were about a woman named Shea Willis.

SHEA WILLIS
Man, I, you know, you gotTa love the media. Oh my God, they have mangled. I don't even know where they got my information from, but they have mangled it and twisted it and they've put two different things together.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
That’s Shea, the person Marty mentioned a minute ago. Obviously, she did not commit suicide. You’ll have to forgive the audio on this. This was my first interview with Shea back in 2018, when I was writing the article for The Dyrt. So at this point, I hadn’t even thought about doing this podcast.

SHEA WILLIS
I saw one report somewhere, I don't remember which website it was. It said something about I took this group out there and one of the investigators tried to commit suicide afterwards and I was like, no, no, no, you got that totally wrong. You have blended stories that are years apart.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
Back in the early 2000s, Shea was friends with a man named Chris Pugh, who was intimately familiar with the weird goings-on at Braley Pond. He used to live just five minutes from there and would spend a lot of his time casting and collecting Bigfoot prints in the area. Yes, that’s right, I said Bigfoot.
Back in 2003, Chris had heard of a gang-related murder that happened at Braley Pond. He was aware of the rumors related to it - weird paranormal stuff going on, a lot like what Marty Seibel mentioned earlier. And he wanted to check it out for himself. That’s when he called Shea and asked her if she’d be interested in checking it out.
As someone who had plenty of her own experiences with the paranormal, she, of course, said yes.

SHEA WILLIS my first indicator that there was something odd going on, um, at Braylee was when I met Chris. And, um, he had, when I went out to their house and realized that they lived right next to bring the pong with them five minutes away, I was telling him that was my old stomping grounds and he pulls out this set of plaster casts, um, that for all intents and purposes, um, are there, they're a big foot. Things are huge.

SHEA WILLIS
He collected those from the woods behind Braylee and you have to understand that Braylee is situated on the outer edge of a very large tract of, um, national forest.

And so once you get past Braylee and you get into the woods back there, it becomes very mountainous and it goes on forever. There. I mean, nobody lives back there. It's all wilderness. And so we all in it. It's, um, it's this huge section of this area called West Sebesta.

And, um, so we had, we, I mean, we'd always assumed that there were lots and lots and lots of wildlife back there, but I had never really explore, explore the area behind the pond until I met Chris. And, um, so then after that, um, and he took me and showed me where he had gotten the cast, we went on a hiking excursion, full day hike, um, took a couple of my kids with us at the time who were teenagers. And, um, we didn't find anything, but it was, it was really interesting to see where he has, he had poured those tasks and um, and the story behind how he found them.

SHEA WILLIS
And so it was after that that the, the, the murder had taken place before that. Um, but I didn't know about the murder. I, I, I don't watch the news,

SHEA WILLIS
And um, so he said to me, do you know about the murder that took place out here? Original, ritualized gang related murder? And I said, no. And he says, well, he says there's been other odd things that are going on around Braylee that we think are related to that murder. And he asked me if I would be interested in exploring that with him because he knew my abilities and tendencies. And so I said, absolutely.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
I should say here that Shea has a special gift. More than an empath who is highly sensitive to other people’s emotions, she’s able to read the energy from the people and space around her. She can tell when something traumatic has happened in a particular area without knowing anything that happened there. She’s able to tell if someone is inherently good or bad. That may sound like no big deal, that she just has good instincts. When I first met Shea, I thought the same thing. But there’s a lot more to her gifts than I’m revealing, which we’ll get into in a later episode.

SHEA WILLIS
And that was the point at which I stopped him. I said, don't tell me anything else about it. I don't want to know anything else at all about what happened out here because I don't, I don't want to be polluted.

SHEA WILLIS
if you're getting information psychically and you've got that intellectual piece of information, it's hard not to compare what you think, you know with what you're, you're receiving. And so I usually try to say, don't, don't tell me anything and let me find it out on my own and then we'll check facts. And so he did.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
Shea and Chris Pugh were part of a community of ghost hunters, psychics, and others who had similar unique gifts like Shea’s. They all loved Medieval history and attended renaissance fairs together. There was even a guy who believed he was a vampire. A pretty eclectic group you could say. They were all interested in pushing the limits of what they thought spirituality meant and could be. This group hung out pretty often, usually getting together at Chris’ house. And they acted as a group of mentors to some down-on-their-luck teenagers and kids in their early 20s, who believed they had energetic and psychic abilities as well. They came from troubled backgrounds - drug abuse, abusive homes, or no homes at all. Shea, Chris, and the others took it upon themselves to help these kids develop their abilities, a sort of informal Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, if you get my X-Men reference.
Chris and Shea went to Braley Pond twice that day. The first time, they went with a bigger group, including the young mentees.

SHEA WILLIS
Um, the first time that we went out, when we took the whole group with us, it was still daylight and this is in October, the end of October.
it was just beginning to get dark. So it, this was late afternoon for, you know, between four and six o'clock that we were there.
And we were originally, we had intended to have everybody sit down along with them, um, or maybe go into the Woodland a little ways. And we were, we, the intent was to have everyone sit down and we would sit in a kind of meditation to see what these folks could pick up on. And then we would take that experience and teach them how to, um, to expand it. And so we went up and sat on the sat down on the dam and we were there long enough for us to complete that exercise. And then we left and went back to the house.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
In that hour and a half or so worth of time, mysterious things started happening with Shea and the rest of the group.

SHEA WILLIS
It was, uh, there was a, it was a level of, I don't want to say anxiety, that's not the right word. It was an influence. There was this level of external influence that just really messed up my system, psychologically and, and, and physically and I did not feel well at all. I'm in. I was, I really felt I did feel nauseous and I, and I was, um, just really drained and very upset.

SHEA WILLIS
And unbeknownst to me, somebody that was at the far end, I think it was one of the women that was at the far end of the group, um, she actually vomited. So, you know, and there were a number of people in the group that the whole experience did not make them feel well at all. It was the same type of thing. It was just nauseatingly kind of underlying just yuck, there's something wrong here, kind of feeling.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
I should note here that I reached out to Chris Pugh to get his take on all of this, and he originally agreed to talk. But because he suffers from hearing issues, he preferred to talk in person. When I made it to Staunton, Chris declined to meet with me over Facebook because his store - Medieval Fantasies Company, which specializes in Medieval, Renaissance, and Victorian-themed merchandise, was struggling to stay afloat. He addressed me in our Facebook messages as Lord Charles and said he simply was too stressed and didn’t have the time, which I understood. But hey, if you’re ever in the Staunton area, check out Chris’ store. He can even teach you how to fight with medieval weapons like swords, shields, and longbows, which I think is pretty cool. Or check out their website. I'll include a link on the episode notes.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
After Chris and Shea took the larger group home, they went back out to Braley Pond around midnight to explore the area more. And that’s when things went from strange to completely nuts.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
Let me give you a little background on the murder that took place at Braley Pond. On May 22, 2003, 19-year-old Christopher S. Kennedy was murdered by local gang members there. Two of the members lured Kennedy to the site, stabbed him 13 times in the chest and back, and then dumped his body into the water. The murder took place somewhere around 2:30 a.m. and Chris’ body was found by a fisherman around dawn the next day, partially submerged in the pond. The Augusta County sheriff at the time stated, “there was a lot of violence at the crime scene.”

SHEA WILLIS
I didn't know who Chris Kennedy was at that time. I didn't find that out until later. But I could feel what Chris was feeling. I could feel the dread, the terror. Um, I could feel the hopelessness and the, the, it was awful. And, um, I could also feel the other people there. I could, I could feel the energy of the people that were intending to, to, to commit the crime and it, and then it was also odd because it was almost like behind that there was another layer of intelligence, another layer of energy that didn't match any of the human emotions and feelings and thoughts and intent. It was something else.

SHEA WILLIS
And when I got up to the top of the Hill, I was still experiencing all of those human emotions from all the people that were involved in the events. But that's when I felt it was something else. And Chris felt it as well cause he said to me, Oh my God, do you feel that I didn't say it. He said it and I was like, aha. Oh yeah. And at that point was when he, he literally grabbed onto me and turned my head to the left.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
That’s when Shea saw a huge, bright green glowing orb floating near a massive pine tree. According to her, it was 30 or 40 feet off the ground and was between 4 and 6 feet wide.

SHEA WILLIS
I was fumbling for my camera trying to get a picture of this thing because my mouth was hanging open. Both of us were, and it just winked out. It didn't fade. It didn't fly away. It just, it was like someone, um, flipped the light switch. It went off. I don't know how to describe it and it was just a few seconds after that that we heard the first splash in the water down below us, um, at the bottom of the dam. And it was a big splash.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
Shea’s first thought was that the splashing sound they heard might be the beavers that live at the pond. But the more Shea thought about it, the more she realized it didn’t sound like a beaver tail splashing at all.

SHEA WILLIS
Um, but normally what the beavers will do is they'll swim up, they'll, they'll, they'll get close to you to give you a warning and they'll slap the surface of the water with their tail. And then as a general rule, they'll take off to see what you're going to do. And, um, the only time that they would really, really attack is if you got too close, um, to one of their lodges. They had young, you know, that kind of thing. And we were nowhere near a lodge.

SHEA WILLIS
This noise was like a human being. I'm trying to climb their way out of the mud and the water. It was the splashing noise and do of us are looking at each other going, this is not right. There's something wrong here.

SHEA WILLIS
It's like part of me was terrified because there was something there that didn't belong there and I can feel that I shouldn't be there either. And then there was this other part of me that was almost almost hypnotized with this fascination over what was it? What, what, what is this thing?

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
That’s when Shea and Chris began running for their lives.

SHEA WILLIS
I can hear something behind me and I could definitely feel it. And we made it to the bridge.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
As they ran, Shea and Chris heard what she described as a loud screech, which I’ll play now. Once they made it to the bridge, however, something happened to Chris.

SHEA WILLIS
I was, I don't know, maybe six, eight feet behind him and we were about two thirds of the way across the bridge. And I, it was one of the most strangest things I've ever seen. He was literally hit, he looked like something invisible, hit him on his right side and just shoved him right off the bridge. I mean, his feet flew up in the air and he just went right over to the side there. There were, um, no railings and, uh, he just flew right over the side and down into the Creek below.

CHAARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
Shea rushed over to Chris and tried to help him up but Chris kept screaming at her to Go! Go! ...Now, here’s where it really got intense…

SHEA WILLIS
And before I could get up and move, whatever it was that was behind me, landed on my back and it wasn't, I could feel what felt like a physical presence. I could feel heft like it had substance. Um, more than that though, I could feel its energy signature, which is unlike anything I have ever experienced before or since.

SHEA WILLIS
Whatever was in that water, whatever came up over the band, whatever it was that was following us across the bridge, I had stopped and it caught me.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
With Chris Pugh screaming at Shea, “We’ve got to go! We’ve got to go!” they both ran to Chris’ truck. Shea told me that at this point, she was hysterical - crying, screaming. Chris shoved her into the passenger side of his small truck, then he hopped into the driver’s seat and they took off, tearing out of Braley Pond.

SHEA WILLIS
And I kept saying, it's between my shoulder blades is on my back. It's between my shoulders. And he kept feeling around my back and he kept saying, there's nothing there, there's nothing there, there's nothing there. And I kept insisting that there was, and I think he thought I was just hysterical or something.

SHEA WILLIS
And it, when it first landed on me, it was like, it, it felt like it was about the size of a 12 inch piece of pan with, with Pentacles coming off of it. I don't know how else to explain it. And it didn't, it didn't slide it like hump the long like an inch worm would do. And I mean, I could feel this thing humping along my shoulders.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
What Shea didn’t know then, but later found out, was the Christopher Kennedy was thrown into the water after he was stabbed.

SHEA WILLIS
but what I didn't know was that they had thrown the body into the water and I believe he was still alive at that point after I found that out. And it's totally circumstantial and it's just, you know, maybe putting pieces together that shouldn't be put together. But honestly that whatever was coming up out of that water sounded like a human being, you know.

SHEA WILLIS
Now I am not implying in any way, shape or form that it was Chris Kennedy that came up out of that water after me cause it wasn't, I just thought that it was really odd that what I heard did sound just like a person flailing around in the water.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
I need to point out a few things about Shea. She’s extremely intelligent and has kept detailed notes about what happened to her at Braley Pond back in 2003. In fact, she keeps extremely detailed notes on all of her investigations. In the more than two years I’ve known her, she’s sent me novel-long emails with photos and videos about her research. To me, she doesn’t seem prone to just make things up. She’s very analytical, and passionate about her energy work. She takes it very seriously.

SHEA WILLIS
This is like I was saying, it's one of the hazards of when you receive psychic information and you also have counterparts of, of intellectual information, it's, it's really hard not to try to put a puzzle together that, you know, put pieces together that maybe don't belong. And, um, sometimes you do it even unconsciously. You don't mean to do it. And so, you know, if you, if you look at just the synopsis of those events, we're standing there on the, on the top of the, the dam and I'm feeling this horrible presence and I can feel the pain and the fear and I can, I can feel the anger.

SHEA WILLIS
And it was awful. It was this gleeful feeling from the assailant. It was just, it was unnerving how gleeful they were about what this horrible thing they were about to do. And, and, and even while they were doing it,

SHEA WILLIS
I always assumed that whatever that something may be materialized out of the light and dropped into the water and then climbed up out of it. Now I'm not so sure because there was never any actual evidence that what landed on my back came out of the water. None. It just appeared and it followed us across. I could feel it.

SHEA WILLIS
It was following him, but my God, what if, what if the clamoring about in the in the water was actually the remnants of, you know, of the energetic imprint of Chris Kennedy being there and didn't have anything to do with the green light

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
Once Chris Pugh got Shea back to her house, he told his wife at the time, Kahala - an empath herself - about the invisible creature on Shea’s back.

SHEA WILLIS
she, she finds it and she, she like does some, I can't see what she's doing. She's doing some stuff behind my back and I can literally feel this thing like trying to hold on and it's being pulled off of me. Like, uh, you know, like a, a sticky sucker that a kid laid down on the coffee table.

SHEA WILLIS
and there's, there's strings of stuff that you know, you pull up and it's, the sugar is in between the coffee table and this and the sucker. And that's what it felt like. It was like they resist strings of stuffs as she was pulling it off of me that were still sticking to me. And she says, uh, okay, open the door.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
When Shea turned around, she saw Kahala holding her hands apart, about the width of a volleyball, with seemingly nothing in-between but air. Kahala went to the backyard. Shea couldn’t tell what she was doing but she saw her waving her hands over an open fire. And then, 10 minutes later, Kahala came back in.

SHEA WILLIS
And when she came in the door, when Chris's wife came in the door, she was not the same person, um, at all.
It was, it was like there was something shifted in her. And Chris immediately, of course, said to her, are you okay? How did it go? Do you need anything? As you did? Were you able to get rid of it? And she was a redhead. Um, very fiery temperament. And she gave him a look, cut her up to the side. This glare, unlike anything I had ever seen crossed her face. Um, I mean it was, it was, you could feel the physical energy of this glare and it was anger and in there and there was no reason for it to be.

CHARLIE MOSS - NARRATOR
The angry energy that Shea describes could be felt all over the house, similar to how they felt at Braley Pond. The next morning, it was gone. But that doesn’t mean Shea was rid of it. She wasn’t. In fact, it was only the beginning…
END -